The Kill Switch
by Naniris
Summary: Shortly after post-game, Alex tries to help Dana recover from her coma. But is it too late? And what will everything mean when he can't trust his instincts or his reason to make the right choice? Warning: Explicit descriptions of somewhat gore and biology


**The Kill Switch**

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There are mechanisms in place, both by design and by nature to prevent certain self-destructive acts. Species-specific gonads to prevent interspecies mating, rails against vertigo-induced falling, depression to temper suicidal tendencies into inaction, the weak-minded easily led into mob mentality as the lack of a survival instinct defeat individual efforts, even a tar bump on the road as a deterrent against speeding. It all serves a singular purpose of maintaining life as is. The status quo.

One of the most basic of these fail-safes in many animals, including humans, is a kill switch. By kill, it means stop. As in a complete and total 'kill' of every action. A shutdown mode, hibernation, a slow reboot. People freeze up, might even black out, and whatever they were about to do, they stopped. Many industrial machines have brightly colored red and yellows surrounding the toggle to help localize it when needed. Not so easily identified in a person's mind.

It takes endless training and conditioning to overcome this base instinct and many people cannot unless pushed to extremes. There are many triggers; however, the main one that soldiers bury deep and ignore is humanity's inability to blindly kill another human being, to strike a deathblow when no immediate danger is present.

Alex Mercer has his own version of a kill switch, a much more literal interpretation. He snaps from time to time as though someone turned on his psychotic rage and massacred in sporadic episodes, each more deadly than the last as he grew in strength. There was no stopping him when violent compulsions had him running up buildings to elbow drop into an unsuspecting crowd. His senses danced in fire as sharp ringing and crazed laughter bubbled ever louder from deep within his web. He lost himself in the furious dance as he spun midair; momentum his graceful partner that scowled at the lesser beings that trudged so slowly in gravity's wake.

He only pondered idly about how easy it was for him to rip a policeman in two, how he didn't think twice of kicking a packed car through a refugee haven, how it didn't really bother him to carry a kicking and panicky hostage up to a roof to consume in intimate solitude or toss to see the body twist midair like a skipping stone. Behind the dark justice he sought, laid a childlike wonder at how very strong he was and nothing can truly stand in his way.

Except for Cross, that one time with the needle, or Greene with her motherly reprimands tinged in enough madness to confuse and deter him from killing her swiftly.

No, it is not all on Zeus, as the scientist Alex Mercer had little qualms about unleashing unknown red death in a crowded train station and the many consumed Blackwatch soldiers held the redline as children screamed within a burning school with their parents shot dead as they raced to save their supposedly infected progeny. So they are predisposed to ignoring that social norm of not harming the meek. Mercer has no excuse, but Zeus can simply feel it in the pit of his being that swatting a person into a building three blocks away was akin to swatting a fly. No matter how much he learns and how many secrets he uncovers, it didn't change the fact that he had no species to call his own, no people to connect with, no social and biochemical traits to rely on besides Greene's whispered approval.

There wasn't any mechanism that prevented him from slaughtering the hunters and infected, from beating Greene into a bloody pulp to facilitate his consumption. It was her crazed intimidation that welcomed him with open arms and a promise to join the collective that had him avoid her more often than not. Better safe than sorry, better to only approach when his will was strong and he craved to defeat her more than he craved acceptance, to belong.

The only switch within him was a constant flickering green light that never prevented a single death. That only nagged him into reaction, cajoled and teased that letting his enemies live was an invitation of weakness. That mercy and moderation would encourage the soldiers and hunters to crowd him in and overpower him into submission.

For whatever reason, Mercer being a sociopathic narcissist, Zeus being a psychopathic virus, the kill switch that protected one's humanity wasn't working the way it should.

And for that same reason, the soldiers and Cross, the supersoldiers and Blackwatch, the tanks and helicopters, the death-dealing battle cruisers that patrolled the waters; all of his enemies, human and infected alike, didn't feel any remorse or compassion as his body ricocheted between explosive rounds, didn't gasp as his limbs were torn and tossed aside. Like a fly's wings in a child's hand. Just as he viewed them.

There was a catastrophic failure in the matrix of human experience he had pieced together for himself and his malfunction spread more than the non-infectious strain that coursed every strand of his biomass. His vengeance fueled actions toxified the air of the city and bred paranoia in its citizens, their own social norms twisting into chaotic replicas of his own.

Except for one person; Dana, his sister, the last of his family. When the hunter barged through the wall, the carrion stink of its skin a bubble of nauseating sick, he froze. Alex froze because he had no non-lethal attacks and she was too close.

Even running down the street, the guise of an old arthritic man fooled no one as he sprinted madly and vaulted over screeching cars, he couldn't attack. Not that he didn't want to, not that he shouldn't have. Dying a quick death would be the least he could have offered before she was disemboweled alive or made into a shambling infected drone. But he couldn't and he lost her when that large hunter tricked him into standing beneath a barrage of missiles.

He should have killed her, as her older brother he should have made sure no harm came to her since rescue was a farfetched possibility. But there it was; his kill switch, the person who gave him pause and curbed his actions.

And now, here in a basement morgue, the air cool enough to leave vapor after each breath, she laid in a coma and he can feel the special strain of a runner swirling within her, he can feel Elizabeth's caresses across her arms and into her body, spilling pieces of herself into the only family blood that hadn't been tainted yet.

And now it was, and the toggles of behavior were creaking back and forth as he fought with indecision. Greene was dead, her memories still fresh in his web and he knew why his sibling was targeted, for the insidious plan meant for the rest of her existence.

He should kill her, especially now, when she was unconscious and would realize nothing more. Her life a vivid dream she had never awoken from. It's important that she dies before she wakes because he's seen enough memories to know that whatever amorality he felt and dealt with was nothing compared to a runner.

A being of instinct, practically a paranoid schizophrenic as Greene would lead the way as an echoing voice that warned that the bad men from the government would harm the baby. Greene's baby was no longer Pariah, only the growing infection and she wanted her baby boy to thrive and grow oh-so big. The runners were simply surrogates that carried Elizabeth's offspring, a ticking time bomb that would blossom into a mass of bio-tissue that would create the first hive in a new city or out-of-the-way town.

Dana deserved better than that, but he couldn't bring himself to act, couldn't spew the words to Ragland and have him slip her into a more permanent sleep. The doctor would have wanted to study the strain that hid so well from his tests. Enough hands had already spread unwanted across her skin; he wouldn't put her into another situation like that.

Well, maybe only once more. He had to try and maybe it would work. She'd never be free from the virus, it mutated too often for the body to fend off, but she could be free from the runner strain if a stronger one took its place.

He lowered himself as one hand stroked her hair back to reveal her pale, sweat swamped forehead. His other spread over her stomach, over her womb, where Greene left a viscous ball of pestilence to mesh with his sister's ovaries and recreate Greene as a genetic mix of their DNA. Parthenogenesis, a female egg fertilized by another female egg, no male needed. Elizabeth was unable to get Alex so she sought his sister as a close enough genetic match, to bring his laboratory fabricated strain that much closer to merging with her Darwinian one. To create children that no military man could snatch away from her.

A part of him was glad he had no other living family, since this was becoming too much like a Greek tragedy in which incest ran rampant.

He kissed her forehead as his hand pressed tighter down and soon both points of contact became a swirl of red and black tendrils that dug into her flesh. Rivulets of blood coursed down slowly from the deep wounds that would soon seal away again. Her brain, still noticeably human, was slowly wrapped by thin strands of his biomass. Strands that would spread to cover every nook and crag of her gray matter in order to claim the territory against any other invading disease that would follow.

By her stomach, his hand was an unrecognizable array of prehensile tentacles with sharp bladed tips. With a delicacy he had never shown any other human being, he carefully snipped and sliced her uterus free from her body, each bloody snick quickly sealed by his own flesh that melded into a perfect replica of her veins and arteries.

The bloody gaps in her forehead and belly were healed easily, leaving only the smear of unexplainable blood over the skin to raise any questions. He held the still warm organ in his monstrous limb and considered it; a black lump had formed near its middle, dark arteries already spreading from it as it consumed nutrients and commandeered flesh. It had not burst yet, which was good, but amino acids and capsids had leaked into her bloodstream and still poised a threat.

It was a matter of time, now.

Ragland had a small incinerator in his lab, dealt with enough sickly pieces of infected to use it often. Mercer was about to chuck it in and burn the abomination away when he noticed the egg-shape at the end of her right fallopian tube. The other had begun to atrophy, inflamed with small dark spots near the tip. The right one looked healthy from what he remembered from his days autopsying corpses.

Mercer could replicate a lot from those he consumed, but not the meiosis cells, the reproduction tools that melded DNA into a new person. Only those cells with a full set of chromosomes were within his capabilities to replicate.

He had effectively sterilized his sister with no consideration of how she felt about it, without even giving her a warning. Maybe he could save this ovary and her potential children. Perhaps the Mercer bloodline wouldn't die out with them. He certainly didn't produce sperm anymore, even as he subconsciously reconstructed himself as larger than he was before. And the man that was Alex Mercer had no intention of rearing children, but Zeus felt the biological imperative to reproduce and propagate. He lied to himself that it was consumed parents that led to this desire.

He stood there, a horrific sight of a devil hovering over a prone woman, her womb wrapped around his black claws.

Wrapped?

Yes, the organ had slowly coiled itself around his disfigured wrist. The dark lump now had a distinguishable slit that slowly fluttered open to reveal a bloodshot eye the same color as his icy blue ones. Heat looped around his hand as vast amounts of energy was released as the tissue transmogrified into a half-being. Small, yellowish teeth formed at the mouth of the cervix and bit into his arm and _chewed_ as black nails spurted from the atrophied ovary, the dark spots now revealed for what they were.

Mercer sighed at the atrocity eating him. No point in wondering whether or not his sister should be able to have kids. He had waited too long.

One handed, he turned on the incinerator to let it heat up. The beast struggling to gnaw through his armored wrist would break free from the metal vessel if he didn't subdue it first. He walked to the large stainless steel sink and pressed the stopper into the drain. A quick turn of a handle had a rush of frigid water thunder into the sink as it rapidly filled.

Mercer glanced at the eye, now wide and scanning the room, a yellowish crust had formed on the corners as it gratingly rolled in its fleshy socket. "Do you have enough brain matter to think?" He nodded to the sink, beads of condensation already forming on its outer shell. "Do you what water does to us? Does to you?" No change in ferocity, only the click of nails as the left ovary coiled in and out. "I once tried to teach the family dog how to swim. It didn't go too well." A small quirk of his mouth could be considered a smile, if not for the detached coldness in his eyes. "Don't think I've gotten any better."

He braced himself, it was going to hurt. A burn like acid peeling away layer after layer of living skin. He was used to it, had jumped off enough piers and bridges to get away that the pain was only a warning instead of a mind numbing shock. Before he plunged his arm into the frigid liquid he saw the still healthy looking ovary twinge into an ear. "Can you hear me now, Greene? Can you understand me?" Mindless jerks and twitches, a tooth cracked against his outer shell. "It doesn't matter, I'm going to kill you again and I'll keep killing you."

He thrust his arm down up to the elbow, fully submerging the inhuman mass that writhed epileptically within the water. A pink tinge rimmed the top as blood rose up, the shaking water now splashed back and forth as Alex felt the thing bang against the sides. It let go of him and floundered unable to even float. He snatched it up, the bladed tips of his fingers slicing into the blistered flesh and strode to the blazing furnace of the incinerator. "Not only you, I'm going to find Pariah and kill him too. You ended my family line, I'm going to end yours."

He shoved the writhing mass of pain into the scalding heat and slammed the door shut. Its last feeble bangs a pathetic reminder of how weak it was.

Alex Mercer allowed himself an evil little smile that few people saw, the last being Cross on the rooftop days ago. It stopped short as he felt a long thin blade pierce through his chest and slice upwards, the unexpected fall twisting him enough to see Dana standing behind him, except her face was off, the proportions slightly wrong, her eyes a dark auburn. "…no."

A slight tilt of her head and a vapid smile confirmed that it was Greene more than anything else. "Why did you kill your sister? Why take my baby?" He expected the echoing emptiness of her voice, but it came out normal with a slightly sharp whip at the end of each sentence, the way Dana talked.

What currently functioned as a makeshift heart inside his chest was hammering arithmetically, a beat away from failure and replacement with another on-the-fly organ. "…no. No. NO!" Glossy black tendrils twisted towards each other to unite his chest into a whole. Much too slowly.

Soft hands planted themselves at either side of a flat stomach. "Never safe in the belly. Always ripped away too soon. Always taken away from there." As she spoke, nails had dug into the skin and racked thin trails of raised flesh. "I hide in the mind. Grow there and grow Dana a new body so I can keep hers." One hand by her temple, the other still on her stomach, a mockery of pantomime for the sick. "Wanted her to be perfect. Remade as my daughter. So much power, had to concentrate, so I slept." Her eyes closed on the last word, her head lolling sideways in a lazy arc.

He had used too much energy to operate on Dana, had hurt himself in the water for too long. If he stood up now, his body would split down the cleaved wound. "You fuckin' bitch. Get out of her. LEAVE HER!" Words rushed, voice raised, he was losing his composure and would soon brawl it out if need be.

Replying as though he wasn't about to rip her throat out, she tilted her head back and sadly nodded his way. "You took her when she wasn't ready, but you gave me such a gift. Now I can change my shape, I can defend myself without hurting my babies, my hunters and hydras won't die for me anymore." Her hands flashed metallically as she demonstrated the possibility of every finger as a killing blade. "I can hide." Her facial features merged gradually back into Dana's. It was inefficient and sloppy, a weak facsimile of his own abilities, but it was more than enough. "When she was gone, I could wake up. She woke up too. Poor girl." Her fingers returned to normal as she covered her face as if to weep, Dana's wide eyes darkening back to brown.

One arm had transformed into a skinny hammerfist to support his weight as he slowly rose from the floor. "Don't lie. Don't you fuckin' dare lie to me." Zeus' breaths came out jaggedly as his anger flared without an outlet. If Dana was in there a spike barrage would do her no good. He had to save her, somehow, he had to make this right.

From between her fingers came a wistful voice, a slight echo burning underneath. "Poor Dana, burned twice. I could hear her, she was so scared. Just a baby, no clue about the world. And just like one, the first thing she did was put things in her mouth. It didn't hurt you; you didn't need to punish her." She looked straight at his eyes and shook her head in disappointment.

He stumbled up to Greene and held her shoulders tightly, his face an inch from hers, close enough to kiss. "Give me my sister back, get out of her. Don't do this, if you thought I hurt you bad before, you have no idea what hell I'll get ready now." His eyes flashed nearly white as he stooped slightly to see her eye to eye. "She doesn't deserve this."

This close, Zeus saw the tear form, wet the eyelid and slide slowly down Greene's cheek. "I'm sorry, Alex. She's gone." No, Dana's cheek. It was Dana's body, with Greene as an unwanted parasite. She's not dead. Can't be. Not like this. Because if this is Greene, then that monster he burned in water and flame might really have been… could have been…

His jaw unhinged itself as he bared his teeth and shrieked an inhuman growl at her face. Limbs stretched, arms and legs disjointed as his shoulder blades sprung from his back as sharp fins of jagged bone. The only recognizable human part left was his cold eyes which scowled into Elizabeth's eyes; his threat delivered the only way he could think how.

She didn't bat an eye at his show of strength, instead pressing her hand by his face in a soft stroke down to his chin. She held it and tilted his head down with her monstrous strength, hard enough to rip the jaw off of a normal man. "I wish that you could be part of my family, Alex. You're everybody's big brother. But you're spoiled and mean. I won't let you hurt my son."

At this defiant disinterest, Alex was caught in a stalemate between what needed to be done and what he wanted to do. He had to exterminate Greene, had to make sure that the only leader mind around was his own so that the infected left remained docile and stupid enough to be easily executed by the soldiers. And regardless of whether or not Dana is technically alive or dead, Elizabeth had matured enough to take complete hold and there was no way to free Dana. Best would be to end her existence in case she was still aware.

He wanted, beyond any other feeling he can recall, he wanted to save Dana and just have her alive and near. Though she recoiled and flinched away from time to time, she still accepted him as her brother, despite the truth he'd never let her know. Not even near, as long as she was alive, that would be fine, because he found that he valued this one tenuous family tie more than he ever expected and he didn't want it to be twisted by the conspiracy-laden viral experiments that took everything else away.

He could have fought, could have pulled of a devastator that would drain him completely, but still his mind swam with indecision, as it did often when not applying his first host's undying vengeance binge. Instead he looked at Greene and saw how they had both mixed into this new being that looked like both of them at once. He thought again about kill switches, about how he considered only the first half of the term and not the second.

Switch.

Dana and Greene switched roles, one in a unblemished body, the other…the other thing was just some cloned piece of biomass, not Dana, so he still had hoped that she lurked unconsciously in her brain, a determined wait till she woke up and regained command of her body.

Because right now, he couldn't even see himself killing Greene as she was, an enigma of who's who. It would be simpler to go along with it and bide his time, but the rages from the voices in his web hated Greene more than they did him and he might slip up and kill the body before he knew for sure if it was all lost

With an easy flick of her wrist, Greene sent Mercer careening towards the far end of the morgue; the still full sink, now split in the middle, spilling its contents all over Alex head, into the wound not yet sealed on his torso. "When I see him, I'm going to give him a name. Pariah is Randall's name. My son deserves better. How about Dan? If I name him Dan will you be nice to him? Or Danny?" The last was said hopefully, a wide smile that made her almost seem normal. She leaned closer to his prone form, the makeshift weapons on his back and limbs diluting back into his core as he felt weaker still and kissed his forehead with chaste calm.

As she left undisturbed further, Alex dragged himself out of the puddle of hydrogen bonds that tore his fluid cellular wall to bits. He pounded a single fist down, cracking the tiled floor all the way down to the cement underneath and waited for the cold unemotionality of Mercer's indifference to slip back in. The man had ignored his family ties for years till it was convenient to reach out to Dana again, he would need that vacancy of emotion to do what he needed to do, to overcome his one kill switch and instincts.

He never really had any family to begin with, he needed to remember that. He's a virus competing for an ecological niche against another, when it all boiled down. It doesn't mean anything, the hurt and emptiness, means nothing at all.

Just another hollow memory that needed to be quiet and let him rest.

A/N: I feel it reads a bit disjointedly. If so for you, my apologies, but I can't think of how to polish it up some more at this time.


End file.
